But Chatrie found that the geofence was unconstitutional because of the wide dragnet which included people not suspected of crimes, not because those people were in private spaces:

> The Court held that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained Chatrie's location data, because, as the opinion put it, "an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information."

The analogue with Flock is pretty clear then:

> Just as important as the holding is the reasoning: the Court rejected the government's fallback argument that the search was fine because it only pulled a narrow, time-limited slice of a much larger dataset. Once the Fourth Amendment applies, the majority reasoned, it doesn't matter how small a bite investigators took out of an all-encompassing database.

Is Flock really 3rd party? Yes, they're a private entity, but they largely owe their existence to government contracts. They maintain their database on behalf of various governments. Their primary sales pitch is to law enforcement. It feels like something completely different than Alphabet's or Meta's databases of person/user data.

I do agree that Flock is also not the same as the database of cell phone location data that Verizon or Apple or whoever else might maintain.

It's somewhere in the middle, IMO. At least to my non-lawyer brain.

Not sure I agree. The only difference I see is the idea that there's no expectation of privacy while driving on public roads. That's potentially a huge difference, certainly, but I don't think it makes the negative outcome here quite as likely as you think.

Otherwise, it's the same: Google's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movements in public, and Flock's database is a third-party-owned record of people's movement in public.

The ruling in Chatrie had nothing to do with an expectation of privacy, or lack thereof. It was about the dragnet nature of the surveillance. And in that respect, I don't see any meaningful difference between Flock's and Google's systems.

Yes, while I'm not a fan of fully networked, recorded, ubiquitous license plate tracking, it is quite different than the cell phone.

License plate number is a registered identifier mandated to be fully plainly visible, with that identifier tied to a registered individual; compared to cell phone which has identifiers, sure, but they're not registered to an individual necessarily, and not mandated to be plainly visible, rather only "visible" as a means of service provision.

This court has had little respect for precedent so maybe an argument here is more about the fact that rulings like this one may become more likely.

> In comparison: license plates, when in public, are always visible, and very easy to discern from one-another (different state-unique numbers); so in my mind the expectation of privacy is far lower.

According to Carpenter:

  A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, 'what [a person] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.'

> but is not outside the realm of something a well-funded police department could do

One officer would absolutely not be able to record on that piece of paper every single license plate that passed through a busy intersection. Not even close.

The number of officers that _would_ be required to do so would absolutely be "outside the realm of possibility" for even a well-funded police department.

That's why flock is different. It's a level of scale that was previously—despite your assertions—impossible.

I would say the purposeless capture of information is the correct counter argument here.

Specifically, even if a county hired all those officers and did what you suggest if there is no purpose other than recording all this information. I believe it would be a constitutional violation. A person has the right to reasonable privacy outside of their home. License plates can and should be recorded when there is a relevant purpose to it. Such as toll collection, or a scoped traffic watch done by a police officer or a traffic camera. The dragnet collection of data for "maybe its useful" or "we don't know when it will be useful, but it might" has generally been struck down when brought to the supreme court.

For Flock's case, they don't operate as far as I know as ticket issuing traffic cameras which have a much tighter level of control of how they operate. IE: Traffic cameras have clear signs near them notifying the drivers of their usage, in some states the issuing of the citation cannot be considered criminal (Civil issuance) and must not capture faces of drivers.

This is pretty much how SCOTUS approaches the 4th Amendment, yes.

It's basically a continuous rebalancing of private vs government power, and new technologies cause more rebalancing.

In California, at least, if you are a resident of the state, you are legally required to register cars garaged in California with the California DMV. (It's actually a little ambiguous in an annoying way; even if you have a car that's garaged out of state, simply bringing it to CA for a weekend and driving it around can potentially trigger the CA registration requirement, again, assuming you are a CA resident.)

I'd be surprised if most other states don't have similar vehicle laws.

Interestingly I was watching a body cam where an off duty cop road raged punched a driver.

During the investigation the investigating officer had become worried that the assailant would use police resources to further track and harass the victim.

Luckily the guy was driving a company vehicle that did not track to his address.

>not the tax-evasion that Straw Manners and Ad Hominem attackers make appear to be.

Depends on the state, in my former state, Virginia, it is tax evasion. This is not unique to Virginia BTW, Georgia has similar laws. By law in VA, all cars that are garaged in state for longer than 90 days must pay the car tax. Only reason Montana LLC registered cars get away from it is most counties find out who must pay the tax from Virginia DMV so these cars are missed.

> Here's a reminder that a Montana-LLC registered car is a legitimate privacy-preserving use case and not the tax-evasion that Straw Manners and Ad Hominem attackers make appear to be.

I mean, it’s both, right? You’re definitely getting a tax advantage compared to a lot of areas of the country. And how is insurance going to work?